''End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World'' is a 2019 non-fiction book by journalist Bryan Walsh. The book discusses various risks of human extinction, including asteroids, volcanoes, nuclear war, global warming, pathogens, biotech, AI, and extraterrestrial intelligence. The book includes interviews with astronomers, anthropologists, biologists, climatologists, geologists, and other scholars. The book advocates strongly for greater action.

Ideas

Walsh opens with the

Derek Parfit Derek Antony Parfit (; 11 December 1942 – 2 January 2017) was a British philosopher who specialised in personal identity, rationality, and ethics. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the lat ...

argument that there is an "unimaginably enormous" moral interest in safeguarding the countless potential future generations against

existential risk A global catastrophic risk or a doomsday scenario is a hypothetical event that could damage human well-being on a global scale, endangering or even destroying Modernity, modern civilization. Existential risk is a related term limited to even ...

. Walsh discusses how the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet's widely followed collision with Jupiter motivated increased government action on tracking near-earth objects, and strikes a hopeful tone that other risks can similarly be effectively addressed. On nuclear war, Walsh states "I'm much more scared of nuclear war than I am of global warming because nuclear war can be instant climate change". In the aftermath of a hypothetical

nuclear winter Nuclear winter is a severe and prolonged anti-greenhouse effect, global climatic cooling effect that is hypothesized to occur after widespread firestorms following a large-scale Nuclear warfare, nuclear war. The hypothesis is based on the fact ...

, farming might be impossible; Walsh discusses a "mushroom cultivation" solution which he credits to David Denkenberger's 2014 ''

Feeding Everyone No Matter What '' Feeding Everyone No Matter What: Managing Food Security After Global Catastrophe'' is a 2014 book by David Denkenberger and Joshua M. Pearce and published by Elsevier under their Academic Press. The book analyzed five crop-destroying catastr ...

''. Mushrooms can convert indigestible

cellulose Cellulose is an organic compound with the chemical formula, formula , a polysaccharide consisting of a linear chain of several hundred to many thousands of glycosidic bond, β(1→4) linked glucose, D-glucose units. Cellulose is an important s ...

into edible food, as can rat farming. Walsh calculates a 36-by-4-inch (90-by-10-cm) log could yield two pounds of mushroom in four years; if the post-disaster global population were sufficiently small anyway, Walsh judges such farming might be feasible while waiting for the sunlight to eventually return. In addition, ground-up leaves could provide

vitamin C Vitamin C (also known as ascorbic acid and ascorbate) is a water-soluble vitamin found in citrus and other fruits, berries and vegetables. It is also a generic prescription medication and in some countries is sold as a non-prescription di ...

. Walsh also notes that cannibalism would not provide a sustainable food source. Walsh also argues that

cognitive biases A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, ...

prevent people from giving sufficient attention to existential risks.

Reception

Reviewing the book in ''

Science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

'',

Seth Baum Seth Baum is an American researcher involved in the field of risk research. He is the executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI), a think tank focused on existential risk. He is also affiliated with the Blue Marble Space I ...

of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute stated "Among the crowded collection of books on threats to humanity, ''End Times'' offers an excellent general-purpose introduction". ''

Kirkus Reviews ''Kirkus Reviews'' is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus. The magazine's publisher, Kirkus Media, is headquartered in New York City. ''Kirkus Reviews'' confers the annual Kirkus Prize to authors of fiction, no ...

'' called the book "fascinating and frightening" and said it contained "compelling" solutions. In contrast, ''

Publishers Weekly ''Publishers Weekly'' (''PW'') is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents. Published continuously since 1872, it has carried the tagline, "The International News Magazine of ...

'' judges that the book contains "very few clear answers". The book was included in ''

Nature Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the Ecosphere (planetary), ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the Scientific law, laws, elements and phenomenon, phenomena of the physic ...

'' among "five of the week's best science picks", and also made the August 2019 "Best Books" list by ''

Time Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...

'' magazine.

References

{{reflist, 30em

External links

''Washington Post'' review

Supervolcanoes, asteroids, climate change
(''CBC Radio'' interview with transcript)
Which of These Doomsday Scenarios Is Most Likely to Kill Us All?
(''Popular Mechanics'' interview) 2019 non-fiction books Human extinction Hachette Book Group books

Ideas

Reception

See also

References

External links